About
Money Banks Clothing is the Official Hustler’s Attire. This clothing line represents the underdog that has nothing, but a big dream.
Money Banks Clothing
“Nicky”
The story of Money Banks Clothing starts back in January of 2007 with just a thought in mind, a dish in hand, and seven thousand dollars saved in the bank. My name is Nicky and I was 17 years old washing dishes at a local tavern in New Jersey. The thought has always crossed my mind of starting my own business, but didn’t know where to start. I had a love for snowboarding and wanted to create a snowboard binding company because I did not see a dominating company in the binding industry. One problem with that, I didn’t have any background in engineering or any idea what goes behind creating a binding.
So I thought of something I can do and what I saw a lot of businesses start with, T-shirts. With that in mind my t-shirt design was created. After days of planning and designing, I came to realize one day at school from a class mate, the name I wanted to use was already a clothing brand. That was a minor setback compared to what lied ahead in my young entrepreneur’s path. I tried everything from spray painting to iron on for creating the T-shirts. It turned into a mess of wasted product and lost money.
With help from friends I bought a batch of t-shirts from overseas and silk screened the word CASH onto them. I spent a whole Friday making 25 shirts. The next Monday, my friend and I ran around our high school with a black duffel bag and sold all twenty five in two days for eight dollars each. One morning I was driving my 1990 Pontiac Sunbird to school listening to a Lloyd Banks song, the name Money Banks came about and it was born Money Banks Clothing. The Elephant logo was chosen for the symbolism the animal holds: power, wealth, and luck. My friends saw no future in this so they backed out leaving me on my own to handle Money Banks. It was the first time I thought about giving up because I had no one at my side. After taking a couple days to think, I went for it and ordered a batch of shirts from a silk screening shop and scheduled my first event to sell shirts at. It was a local show down in Lyndhurst, NJ. It was not in a VFW as expected, but outside in a muddy field with a make shift stage.
A good friend of mine and I headed down with thoughts of selling all of my T-shirts. That was not the case, after setting up; another band set their merchandise table right next to ours and started selling like crazy. No one looked at the Money Banks table. As time went on, a full beer can was thrown at the table discouraging us. We left early, but really this just made me buckle down.
For the next three days, I sold the shirts out of my locker and a black duffel bag. I wouldn’t believe, but my own school tried stopping me. I had my principle yelling at me to put the shirts away and another teacher accusing me of selling drugs out of my duffel bag. This didn’t stop me. I was making my money selling shirts out of my locker behind the administration’s back. On my birthday March 10th, 2007 I registered the business with the county and made it official. The next step was finding another spot to sell at. I took it into my own hands and with my friend; we created a local show featuring local acts. It was held at a ski resort. It started out as a party at a house with our friend’s band playing and me selling shirts. With my ambition, I turned a party to 300 kids racking in over one- thousand dollars in door sales and selling over forty shirts. Things were looking good, until December of 2007 when I had to throw another show to start making more money.
With the pervious show being a hit, I thought this was a sure thing. The day of the show two kids were waiting at the door to get in it was the longest night for the company and the best motivation that could have happened. Spring of 2008 came the Bamboozle music fest. I was very nervous hoping we could sell at least one T-shirt. To my surprise we just didn’t sell just one, we sold 200 hundred shirts. I just kept moving forward with Money Banks. With remodeling of the style, logo, and image in general, Money Banks is what it is today and not slowing down.
